DORITOS: Crash the Super Bowl, Checkout Girl

MARIAN SALZMAN: So like probably a zillion others, I tried to check out the URL snackstrongproductions.com that ran at the end of the Doritos commercial and I’m still waiting, and waiting. In fact I’m waiting so long I am actually watching the Sales Genie commercial and trying to figure out how ticked off Doritos folks are that we want to visit their Web site and can’t. ... Besides Doritos, which amused me, and Coke, which I found compelling in various executions, the advertisements in general felt flat.

TOM MESSNER: Seth Godin reported that: >>Someone at Frito Lay told me that they can prove that enough people buy chips during halftime (they leave their house and race out to the store) that the ads pay for themselves.<< Remarkable: Post hoc ergo propter hoc raised to half-time store checks. What we do know is that the Doritos consumer promotion must have generated at least 15,000 (wild estimate based on 1,060 finished spots and spots that got killed by the creators before finishing) sales of bags that otherwise would be still be languishing on shelves undiscovered by Lights, Camera, Action. One kid with a terrific sense of irony sent an e-mail to the blog or whatever that Doritos-Yahoo! had going: “Is it within the rules for me to go out and buy a hundred bags of Doritos?” ... The Doritos spot that won the promotion deserved to win (I saw about 750 of them); I guess that proves that if you show 1060 ideas to a random client, it will pick the best one. OHHHHHHH.....WAAAAIITT A SECOND doritos spot just came on-----WHAT A HORRIBLE piece of excrement....thought they were only running one. Why not quit while ahead??? They paying SAG rates, does anyone know? Right now a great ROI---50,000 dollars to get work on 5 million dollars of media. ... (Later on...) I feel a sense of remorse in having dissed the second Doritos spot. I haven’t produced a commercial I wrote in six years so who am I to criticize these people’s efforts?

STEPHEN VOLTZ & FRITZ GROBE: The Doritos user-generated ad wasn’t our choice, but got great laughs. It just needs a stronger ending.

ANDY BERLIN: Doritos features a car crash and Blockbuster the maltreatment of a mouse by a rabbit and a guinea pig. Huh!? Mayhem to sell. Why am I no longer hungry?

JOSEPH JAFFE: Still not sure why both CGC spots were aired back to back, but irrespective the relative winner was Doritos and loser was Chevy. Both really paid lip service to the consumer component, which wasn’t really pure consumer created content anyway. Ultimately, this was all about pre-game buzz and that’s about it. Personally, I was disappointed that Doritos cuts the winning commerical (which was pretty obvious), but not shocked at the predictable move on their part. It just goes to show....brands want it their way (and that’s not a Burger King plug) and want to be able to manipulate and control to their heart’s content. What was especially interesting about the Doritos campaign was the viewer’s skin in the game. I watched a bunch of crayon colleagues and we were debating which commercial should have won. Bottom line: if you don’t have viewers involved beforehand, give it up and go home!

BARBARA LIPPERT: Can't believe the $12.79 Doritos commercial won the contest! The 21 year old kid who made it said it would really have cost $15.00 if he included the bag of Doritos he ate for lunch. If it looks kinda shakey it was -- The dolly shot was done on roller blades-- the filmmakers couldn't afford a  dolly. The woman who smashes into the car is the guy's wife.  I guess it's the most democratic kind of user generated story-- $12 dollar spot in a $2.6 million slot.  Sure, the winners are kids who are dying (almost literally, from whatthe spot looks like) to work in the business.. Ironically, this can't be good for agencies!

CHRIS WALL: Doritos. User generated content. Don’t give up your day job. ... Big man with a fu manchu and a chunky checkout girl get all hot and bothered over various falvors of Doritos. Silly.

MARK WNEK: I know I work for GM but my favorite spots so far are the car factory robot having a nightmare for the 100,000 mile warranty and the Doritos spot with the big and rib-ticklingly sexy checkout girl. I particularly like the latter for its low budget.

JASON MARKS: I hope this finally dispels the myth of user- generated content, and most importantly as a submission-based campaign. It doesn’t work. These spots aren’t good, or funny, and there is a reason people get paid to make ads for a living. User-gen video campaigns are a bust. People think because of YouTube that there are millions of budding filmmakers out there. First of all, they are mainly thieves, or a happenstance camera man that nailed the 'hit-in-the-balls' shot. Second, it is assumed that YouTube traffic is equivalent to its filmmaker population. But it's not millions of users each posting their own masterpiece, it's actually thousands of users posting thousands of somebody else's masterpiece. That being said, the second one with the Doritos dirty checkout girl was decent. The first one was flat.

February 5, 2007 | Permalink